One of the best things about using social media while training for a race is the ability to follow other athletes who are training for the same event. For me, this means the ability to follow people who are coaches, who have coaches, and who use training plans designed by people other than their inner toddler (I want to SWIM! No, I want to RUN! No, do BOTH! Hopscotch!). That’s been especially helpful when it comes to training for the Great Chesapeake Bay Bridge Swim, as I’ve gotten to follow smart, organized athletes like Donna at Beating Limitations, who introduced me to the challenge that will take me to the starting line of the race June 12: 50K in May.

The challenge literally calls for swimming 50,000 meters in the month of May. It’s a bit like 500 miles in April (see cyclist Katie’s stats), with less actual travel and more chlorine. It’s the perfect goal for me right now, because I can accomplish it with one 6,000-meter swim and two 3,000-meter swims per week. That’s my intent for this month, anyway, but we all know what happens when good intentions meet two-hour-long swims.

I kicked off my training yesterday, with a 3,000-meter swim consisting of a timed 2,000 that I forgot to time, followed by a mini-pyramid of 100, 200, 400, 200, 100 (do you see why it’s good to follow people with real training plans?).

Donna suggested the following sets for longer swims, which I intend to try later this week:

Swim sets… How about: 4 x 10 x 100 with a minute or two between the 10 x 100.

Pyramids: 100, 200, 400, 600, 800, 1000 — and then back down again to take it to 6

Join the insanity by Tweeting your swims with the #50kinMay tag this month!

That’s a lot of swimming! This sounds like a great challenge and ideal for you at this point in your training. I definitely need something to get me going to the pool more often, but 50k might be a bit too ambitious since I think I probably did just over 10k in April.

I would love to take the credit for this challenge, but actually it originated with Jevon O’Neill, @ironmanj on Twitter. Jevon is coming back from a lot of injuries and had to take all of last season off from triathlon. He is great, occassionally blogs too at http://jevononeill.blogspot.com/ – but is always a source of witty jibes on Twitter.

Anyway, I am not sure I am even going to make the distance but I am certainly going to try – that is the point of stretching goals, right? It is what I need too to get my training in line for the swim! I have travel to Hong Kong and Moscow this month for work, so we will see what that does to my meters… Good luck Amy!

Damn, girl! Love how you are aiming high. I know you’ll do it, too!
Thanks for the very helpful reminder that having a training plan (even if you borrow it from someone else) is always better than winging it. I need to adopt that, stat!